From Story to Science
In the next Chapters of AFTER by Dr. Bruce Greyson, we hear his journey from merely hearing “volunteer” stories of near death experiences (NDEs) to developing a standard diagnostic checklist to identify them.
Early on in Dr. Greyson’s interest in Near Death Experiences (NDEs), he realized that he likely was only hearing from those who wanted to tell and had words to tell their story. This did not account for anywhere close to the total of experiences, nor did he know the percentage of people that experience an NDE when close to death. So, he set out to make mere anecdotes into a measurable scientific study.
First, he increased his patient pool by interviewing all admits to a cardiac department that came in with a serious heart issue. Within a two and a half year time period, he found that “10 percent of the patients whose hearts had stopped described NDEs, as well as 1 percent of the other patients, who had had heart attacks or other serious cardiac events without complete heart stoppage.”
Once the interview pool was widened outside of those who just volunteered, Dr. Greyson realized a couple of other obstacles to his collection of stories for his research – hesitancy to tell and lack of vocabulary for telling. Many patients, he describes in the book, were reluctant to tell when asked because they thought they would be seen as crazy or not believed by those around them. It might take a few tries to get an entire story from one patient due to this hesitancy to tell. And, “one of the first things many experiencers say is that there are no words to describe what they experienced.” I love the challenge given by Bill Urfer in Chapter 4 – “Try to draw an odor using crayons.”
Hearing this reminds me of the difficulty in describing what yoga has given to me. All we are truly able to speak of is the tangible, the known, but that is only a fraction of what is experienced. Greyson uses a quote from a well-known Sufi mystic, Rumi – “Silence is the language of God; all else is poor translation.” How true.
“It’s frustrating. It really can’t be expressed the way it is; I always fall short. I’m falling short right now. So whatever I say to someone goes into their little sifter, through their own experiences, and registers based on their own frame of reference. I wanted to tell my wife, but I literally couldn’t speak. It’s hard to experience a thing so beautiful, something that means so much to you, something that’s changed your life, and be so darn lonely at the same time.” Joe Geraci
“The language spoken after death was much, much more complex and could literally encapsulate experiences. Even the memories when coming back into my body flattened, simplified, and became symbols of what really happened. I believe this flattening happens simply because the human brain can’t understand a world so much more complex and possibly so alien. When I read about people having seen streets of gold it is amusing, because that would be a flattened example of a complex visual reference – not gold so much as vibrant and alive, I guess.” Steve Luiting
From all of the anecdotal stories, Dr Greyson needed to codify his research. In the early 1980s, he developed a 16-point scale to measure individual NDEs, a “tool that researchers can use to make sure they’re investigating the same experience.” This scale has lasted the test of time and scrutiny by skeptics, but that hasn’t made the road totally smooth in his studies. Even department heads and colleagues continued to challenge Greyson on his passion for this controversial and complex subject. But, he was determined.
“Whatever NDEs were, they were changing people’s lives as surely as our psychiatric drugs and psychotherapy. What’s more, they seemed to do this much faster, more profoundly, and more permanently. And beyond that, NDEs changed not only the experiencers’ lives, but often the lives of others who came into contact with them – including me.” Dr. Bruce Greyson
All of this development of method and scientific exploration of a seemingly spiritual experience resonates so well in the light of BKS Iyengar and his approach to yoga. By creating a step-by-step methodology of learning, approachable to all curious about the practice, he puts within practical reach some of the experiences of ancient yogis. In the introduction to the fourth chapter in Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by BKS Iyengar, there is the list of characteristics found in a “perfect yogi” to contemplate on our journey. And, like Greyson points out in the above quote about NDEs, according to the first sutra in the fourth chapter of The Yoga Sutras, the experience of yoga can similarly be had in many different ways – through birth, chanting, drugs, devotion, and meditation. However, the 8-limbed path of direct experience and practice is the most permanent and affecting.
I was tickled by the story in the last pages of Chapter 5 of AFTER that describe the necessity for any science to take into account “anecdotal evidence”. Of course we need anecdotes, but it is what we do with those anecdotes all together that matters. Greyson concludes, “I don’t want my doctor to accept my chest pain at face value as proof that I’m having a heart attack, but I don’t want him or her to dismiss my symptoms as meaningless anecdotes. I expect my doctor to look into my chest pain and evaluate it in the light of other evidence. The same is true of all anecdotes. It’s equally unscientific to accept them all or to reject them all without evaluation.”
I am going to assume that we might soon be introduced in this book to the 16 points on Greyson’s NDE scale in more detail. And, though there is the acknowledgement that people near death may not always have a NDE, I am still wondering if Dr. Greyson would take into account the NDE scale working for someone who may not have had these experiences “near death”, but in deep meditation or yogic states.
